One of the best ways to create brand awareness is through content marketing. Blogging, emails, and infographics are all impactful ways to engage your audience and sell your brand. But the benefits of content marketing are limited to the audience you conjure up. Sure, strategic SEO is invaluable, and, when applied to your content marketing, SEO can reel in the right leads for your company. But if one of your objectives is to raise brand awareness, then you need to strive for more consumer eyes.
Steps:
Start with your objective
When you start building paid ads with Facebook Ad Manager or LinkedIn Campaign Manager, the first thing you’re asked is: what is your objective. The choice you make will affect your ad options, so choose carefully.
On Facebook, for example, there are three objectives categories. They represent the stages that a customer is expected to pass through from being completely unaware of your brand, to being a loyal, repeat customer. It’s called the customer journey. Campaigns can focus on one stage of the journey, or make use of all three.
Know your audience
Advertising that targets everybody is called “spray and pray”. Like spraying an ad up on a billboard and praying a customer sees it walking past on the street. It’s possible to spray and pray social ads, but it’s very expensive. By narrowing down your target audience, you’re able to be much smarter with your budget.
Every product or service has ideal customers. Advertisers often build and study the ‘personas’ of ideal customers in extreme detail to better understand who and how to target their products or services.
Pick the right social media platforms
Once you know your objective and your audience, you’ll be able to choose the right social media network for your marketing campaign.
The reason so many guides focus on Facebook is that Facebook has a wide range of both objectives and audience demographics. But your campaign could play better on LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube, or even traverse multiple platforms if you know your audience is there.
Decide who you’re targeting
Once you’ve decided which social platforms to use in your ad campaign, you can explore the detailed audience targeting options available to you on that platform. Why is targeting so important? Because people click on or care about your ads when they are relevant. Targeting and retargeting help your ads find relevant audiences.
On Facebook, for example, you can target audiences based on their:
- Interests
- Gender
- Relationship Status
- Educational Status
- Age
- Location
- Language
Put your retargeting tools in place
Before you launch any ads, also make sure your retargeting infrastructure is in place. That extends to setting up and implementing:
- Facebook or LinkedIn tracking pixels
- LinkedIn Insight Tags
- Google Analytics tracking
Choose the best ad formats
A social media marketing campaign incorporates multiple ads aimed at the same goal. That means you can choose multiple social media ad formats to help reach your objective.
Each type of ad has a different strength and you’ll want to choose the right one, or combination of formats, to drive strong results for your paid campaign.
If your product is visually appealing, consider creating content for image and video ads. If you’re selling products, you can’t go past carousels and collections alongside image or ‘static’ ads and video ads.